In the past I’ve written several blog posts on enterprise architecture in an agile world, most recently together with my colleague Fabian on our tool support for Agile and DevOps, and a bit longer ago on the use of ArchiMate in an agile context. In this blog post, I want to revisit the latter subject and add some newer insights and ideas.
One of the more interesting developments in the tech space taking place right now is the emergence of digital twin technology. For those of you asking What is a digital twin? right now, allow us to elaborate.
In previous blog posts, we have written about various analysis techniques that help you get more value from your models, as well as dashboarding techniques to visualize data in all kinds of ways. These two topics point to a more general theme: the new possibilities you get from enriching your models with various types of external data. We call this Business Intelligence 2.0.
Interviews are where jobs are won or lost. A résumé – especially a strong one – will ensure you get your foot in the door but to actually secure the position you need to shine during the interview, which means being prepared. Preparation makes you look knowledgeable and relaxed, two traits that people generally prize in their work colleagues.
– Marc Lankhorst, Fabian Aulkemeier
In a previous blog post on the features of our collaboration platform, we have explained how you can support people in working together on architectures and other models via structured workflows. In that post, we looked ahead at future features to support this kind of collaboration. Time to update you on the latest developments!
In my previous blog post (https://bizzdesign.com/blog/a-pattern-for-sizing-archimate-diagrams) I described why it is useful to reduce complexity when creating architecture diagrams. It supports the architect by guiding the creation of diagrams and it supports the reader by not creating overly complex diagrams (too many different types of concepts). Each viewpoint addresses a specific concern, e.g. a capability map to show what the capabilities of a company are. In this blog I will focus on the application layer to provide practical examples using the viewpoint creation pattern described in the previous blog post. The examples are quite generic. They are meant to be used as a starting point for professionals looking to learn more on the subject so they appeal to a large audience.
Previously, I have blogged about stakeholder management and showed you some useful techniques to support this important part of enterprise architecture. In this blog post, I want to address different ways to share architecture information with different types of stakeholders involved in changing your enterprise.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be a buzzword lately, promising techniques and tools that could influence our lives, our work and the way we do business. For many designers and enterprise architects, the question becomes: What would be the role of designers on all levels (strategic, EA, BPM, data, technical) in incorporating AI in a company? There are even ethical questions that may arise when instituting AI in a company, which you must take into account before making the change.
Previously, I wrote about the need to digitize change capabilities and how enterprise architecture can support and provide value to your organization. I also discussed how to categorize architecture descriptions along different levels of abstraction. But there is one dimension I didn’t dive into: How generic or specific is the architecture description compared to your organization?
Over the past decade, reference architectures have been developed and many have been published. They are a very useful start describing an enterprise, and the architectures are more or less specific to our enterprise. I don’t want to lose myself in academic discussions about what should be classified as what, so I will focus on the big points of the idea behind. Read more
– By Marc Lankhorst and Fabian Aulkemeier
An enterprise architecture model, or any other model in your business design practice, contains input from numerous actors within your organization. Your architecture’s governance must continuously collect that input, validate its accuracy and retain a record of all interventions to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, architecture principles, technology standards and other constraints.
In my two previous blog posts, I described dependency analysis and impact analysis. These two kinds of analysis focus on what you might call the steady state of your enterprise, or the enterprise at rest. But there is also the enterprise in motion, where we look at the behavior of the enterprise, in particular its business processes.
When we think about supporting Business Transformation, we immediately start with the detail. Architects and analysts dive into the nuts and bolts, create some brilliant ‘technical designs’ and models but to non-architects, it often appears as “just boxes and lines”. In this blog I will explain some simple techniques to help bridge the gap.
Software platforms such as BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio are powerful tools that can support transformation activities if used in the right way. Otherwise there is a risk it becomes shelf-ware. As the saying goes: “With great power comes great responsibility” Read more
In a previous blog post I wrote about setting the foundations for data collection and management, ensuring the right metadata is available for effective contributions and reporting activities. In this post, I will describe how, if the information is readily available, can be brought into Enterprise Studio. Read more
Since the release of ArchiMate 3.0 last June, my colleagues and I have written a series of blog posts about combining ArchiMate with other standards, methods and modeling techniques. This post summarizes what we have shown you.
In the past, my colleagues and I have written several blogs on the combination of enterprise architecture and agile ways of working (e.g. Enterprise Architecture and Agile Development: Opposites Attract?, Enterprise Architecture and Innovation: A cultural change, Escaping the Jaws of the Project Monster). In this blog, I want to focus in more detail on the use of the ArchiMate language in the context of agile methods, in particular the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Read more
As we stated in the introduction to this blog series, ArchiMate models can usefully be combined with models in other techniques, in order to zoom in on specific aspects of your enterprise. If these models are tied in to an overall enterprise architecture model in ArchiMate, an integrated model of the enterprise can be constructed that relates (sub)models from formerly separate domains in a meaningful way.
As we explained in the first blog of this series , the ArchiMate language is not intended to replace other standards and modeling approaches. For many domains, there are languages and techniques available that provide more detailed descriptions. Read more
As we have described in our previous blog , the ArchiMate language is not intended to replace other standards and modeling approaches, but rather to connect them. In this blog, we will focus on relating ArchiMate to several management-oriented techniques: The Business Motivation Model, Balanced Scorecard, and Business Model Canvas.
The ArchiMate language is not intended to replace other standards and modeling approaches. For many domains, there are languages and techniques available that provide more detailed descriptions. Those languages, such as UML, BPMN and others, have a narrower scope (e.g. UML for specifying software, BPMN for business processes) than ArchiMate, but they lack concepts for relating these to other domains. Read more